The Edge of Tomorrow — Plant Health in the 21st Century
ICPP2018 International Congress of Plant Pathology Plenary Session - Plant Health is Earth's Wealth, Monday, July 30, 2018.
Watch the talk on YouTube or click here for the slides.
Below are the sources I drew from to prepare this talk. I’m grateful to all contributors for their help.
Slide 1. The title "Edge of Tomorrow" was proposed by ISPP President Greg Johnson. It's inspired from the 2014 science fiction movie starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.
Slide 2. “Medicine can cure you one day...” quip is from my colleague Cristobal Uauy.
Slide 3. Pathogens are a recurrent threat to agriculture… The example is wheat blast, which spread from South America to Bangladesh and then to India. The image is from this Hindustan Times article. The Figure below from Ceresini et al. illustrates the current distribution of wheat blast and highlights in brown the 65 countries that have imported wheat from Brazil in 2016/2017.
Slide 4. “When trees die, people die” is the title of this article from the Atlantic. Here is a similar article from Wired Magazine. The sudden oak death outbreak claimed the memorial wood that Paul McCartney established to his late wife.
Slide 5. The image was taken from Science magazine special series “Tomorrow's Earth”. The series calls attention to how we are shaping tomorrow's Earth.
Slide 6. Plant disease outbreaks have increased in frequency according to Fisher et al. Emerging fungal threats to animal, plant and ecosystem health. The figures are from the article and are based on data from ProMED database.
Slide 7. The world cloud was generated by Ksenia Krasileva based on ProMED mail.
Slide 8. Here is the 2013 Microbiology Today commentary "Genomics of emerging plant pathogens: too little, too late."
Slide 9. “Building resilience against crop diseases: a global surveillance system (GSS)” was held at Rockefeller Conference Center-Bellagio, Italy on 12-16 February, 2018. The organizers are Monica Carvajal, Joe Tohme, and Claudia Zuniga. Click here for an archive of the tweets #RFBellagio.
Slide 10 - The nextflu slide was copied from an online presentation by Richard Neher. Follow Richard on Twitter. Here is a link to nextstrain.
Slide 11. The FDA coordinates a network that releases the genomes of 20K foodborne bacterial strains to genbank per year. Here is the link to GenomeTrakr.
Slide 12. Our crowdsourcing approach to the UK ash dieback dieback outbreak was led by Diane Saunders, Kentaro Yoshida and Dan MacLean. The genome of the fungus was sequenced and released to the OpenAshDieBack web portal within months of the first detection of the outbreak. Here is one of the first news items on the topic. Check also the 2013 MacLean et al. article. For a more comprehensive study on the fungus check McMullan et al.
Slide 13-16. Many thanks to Tofazzal Islam and his team for their invaluable input and for making the #openwheatblast project happen.
Here is the Islam et al. 2016 paper. Many thanks to Daniel Croll and Pierre Galdieux for leading the early analyses.
Slide 17. Genotyping by multiplex amplicon sequencing is performed in collaboration with Kurt Lamour and Floodlight Genomics. Their slogan is "Genotype The World". The work was led by Sarai Reyes-Avila, Emilie Chanclud, and Joe Win with contributions from Daniel Croll.
Slides 18-21. Our understanding of plant-pathogen interactions has matured around a number of fundamental concepts. Check Dodds and Rathjen 2010, Win et al. 2012. Download the animated slides via @figshare.
Slide 22. Maqbool et al. 2013. De la conception et al. 2018.
Slide 23. The ICPP talks I referred to are by Josie Maidment and Juan Carlos De la Conception. Follow Josie and Juan Carlos on Twitter.
Slide 24. For our work on synthetic R+ genes, check the papers of Segretin et al. 2014 and Giannakopoulou et al. 2015. Check also the work of Roger Innes on using decoys to expand the recognition specificity of a plant disease resistance protein. See also the Giannakopoulou et al. commentary on the decoy strategy and other approaches to retool the plant immune system (see Figure).
Slide 25. The figure is from a recent review on CRISPR crops by Langner, Kamoun and Belhaj. Check our also how a transgene-free powdery mildew resistant tomato can be rapidly generated by removing a piece of DNA. Back in 2012, we argued that plants with DNA deletions should not be viewed as GMO.
Slide 26. Sadly, aspects of the 2006 cult movie idiocracy turned out to be prophetic. A major challenge for all scientists is the global trend towards populism and away from science and reason. Here are links to the Guardian article "time to burst the biomedical bubble" and the associated report by Jones and Wilsdon.
Slide 28. Here is a link to DORA-the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. DORA recently released a road map towards improving research assessment. The preprint server bioRxiv has experienced remarkable growth since its launch in 2013 with now over 2000 papers posted by month. Many important papers in the the field of molecular plant-microbe interactions are regularly posted on biorxiv.
Slide 29. Michelmore, Coaker et al. white paper “Foundational and translational research opportunities to improve plant health”. Here is a link to the supplementary table, which provides an overview of the topics discussed at the workshop.
Slide 30. Thanks to the ICPP International Advisory Committee for their input. The word cloud was generated with Wordle based on the IAC suggestions.
Slides 30-31. Many thanks to my lab members and other colleagues at The Sainsbury Laboratory. I'm also indebted to many colleagues for their ideas and collaborations. Most relevant to this presentation, and in addition to the colleagues mentione dabove, is the #BLASTOFF trilateral collaboration with Ryohei Terauchi and Mark Banfield.
Finally, check this amazing sketch drawn by Robin Choudhury during the talk!
